Amanda’s righteous indignation on my behalf is maybe one of the most beautiful things about her. This breaking down of the body… it’s difficult not to take it personally. I’m not as enlightened as I would like, not as unattached as I’d like, so when I’m told the ache in my hip might mean I need a hip replacement… yeah, I think it’s fair to say I was a little angry. I’m not 50 yet. Have you done a lot of work requiring you to stand on your feet? Yes I told the nurse practitioner. She asked the question like she knew the answer already. –This breaking down of the body – is what Amanda calls it through gritted teeth. She spits it out like a curse word. It’s what I have to endure at the moment for this thing called “bills.”

It’s been this way since I was 18. If there was some heavy work that needed to be done, let the big guy do it. It’s not even that I’m all that big in comparison to other guys. I think I take up a lot of space. Only my prolonged absence erases the evidence. I’m pretty good at erasing my footprints. I erase them like a perpetual stranger. But my presence means the physical space I take up, for some reason, erases my education, my experience, and my ability to articulate above grunts and groans (often in spite of my desire to not to). As a matter of fact, there are and have been no end of people in my life who think I’m an educated idiot because, well, I am educated. So it’s no lack of confidence on my part. I don’t do humble well. The job I have now is the only job I’ve been able to get in this “recovered” economy” and while I’ve embraced the inevitabilty of the pain I’ll be in I have a much more difficult time embracing that physical hammering of my body is leaving a mark that may only get cut out by a surgeon making another mark.

It doesn’t do me any good to dwell on anger. I let myself feel it so I don’t hold onto it. I reserve my true rage for Amanda’s behalf — for if she’ll ever need it. It’s the promise I made her that she never asked me to make, like never asking me to not go out again. And I never asked her, either. I never expect it, but I know it’s there. If there’s another definition of love, I don’t know what it is. I embrace the pain because I know she would if our roles were reversed. Knowing what causes it, knowing the root from which it springs, doesn’t really change anything. I’m going to do all things I can to deal with my hip, and chances are it won’t stop me from going back out on the road though it was part of why I cut my recent trip short. I’m still going to work my shit job that breaks my body because at least, for the moment, that’s what’s in front of me.